Helen Greenwood
The Sydney Morning Herald
A handbag has pushed me over the edge. It wasn’t a Hermes Birkin or a Louis Vuitton Tribute or a Marc Jacobs Carolyn or any other arm candy with a flirty name and a price as high as the cost of an education.
It wasn’t the year’s ugliest designer bag, with belts and buckles, logos and patterns, purse pockets and fat straps, that was copied in countless ways and appeared on countless arms.
No, it was the young woman at the bus stop, with a large, rounded bag rendered faux secure by a dangling lock the size of my fist. As I gazed at her and her accoutrement, I realised she was carrying a stylised chastity belt. I got the giggles. Did she have any idea what message she was sending out?
Sigmund Freud is said to have pointed out that sometimes a handbag was the symbolic embodiment of a woman’s vagina. Well, he would, wouldn’t he?
He actually was referring to his patient, the now famous Dora, and alluded to her playing with her “reticule” as representative of masturbating. The young woman clutching her emblematic chastity belt and stuffing it with her most personal possessions seemed to take Freud’s idea in a new direction.
A reticule first appeared in the 18th century as a fashion accessory and dates back to antiquity and the pouches used to carry tools or provisions. Since then, we’ve seen handbags that look like saddle bags, shopping bags and swaddling cloths. We’ve seen bumbags, underarm bags and backpacks. Bags have been bucket-shaped, flat, handleless and huge. They’ve been tiny, beaded, dangling with ornaments, origami-like and collapsible.
The worst were those uptight bread boxes with the too-short straps and the mezzaluna-shaped ones that were impossible to get into. They made women look like five-year-olds playing dress-ups.
The notion that a handbag is a toy, not just a receptacle, is the raison d’etre of fashion. Clothing designers have been flogging accessories as playthings for decades. First shoes, then perfume, sunglasses and, for the past five years, handbags have pushed the bottom line of the couture companies into the black.
According to Dana Thomas, author of Deluxe, while the luxury market grew by 1.2 per cent each year from 2001 to 2004, leather goods sales increased by 7.5 per cent each year.
Handbags have also been pushed onto women like junk food at children. No catwalk collection happens without handbags. Department stores put the bags on the ground floor, right next to those other money spinners: perfume and cosmetics. Paparazzi snap pictures of actrines toting handbags (do any of them pay retail for these?) that are breathlessly re-photographed by glossy magazines.
Women have responded because buying a handbag doesn’t require undressing and seeing your body in the unflattering light of a changing-room mirror. No matter how big or small a woman’s body is, a bag is one-size fits all.
Then there is the instant cachet. Unlike a jacket that has its label on the inside, modern branded handbags strut their labels on the outside. Women get on the ground floor of an aspirational skyscraper courtesy of a barely affordable handbag. This is the much discussed “entry level” to luxury.
American writer Daphne Merkin compares the obsession with handbags to the 17th-century mania for tulips in Holland. Just as the Dutch burgeoning burgher class displayed its wealth with an amoral lust for the rarest plants, women in wealthy societies have developed the It-Bag syndrome.
Also dubbed the Sienna Miller Syndrome, after the petite English actress and socialite who has become a style leader, it’s an epidemic. The Guardian reported in August on a survey in a British shopping centre that revealed the average 30-year-old British woman owns 21 handbags at any given time, and buys a new one every three months – spending up to £380 ($860) a go.
Entrepreneurial websites like Bagborroworsteal.com have cashed in on women’s desperation to sport the latest, renting them ultra-luxe bags so they can change their look more often.
According to Anna Johnson, in her introduction to Handbags: The Power Of The Purse, “a good bag becomes an intimate extension of the body”. Let’s ignore the red herring of why it has to be a “good” bag and note that Johnson’s observation is less overtly sexual than Freud’s, but no less psychological.
We carry bags to carry our secrets, the talismans with which we identify and which makes us feel we exist. We carry bags because we are urban Bedouins on the move from morning to night and living in fear of getting caught without the essentials, even though it’s laughable to think anyone in an affluent society would.
We use bags in other ways, too. They prevent people from getting too close. They are a shield from the bumping on buses and the jostling on footpaths, and just try sidling up to someone who has a bag firmly tucked against their body.
I confess to having been seduced by many handbags. Recently a vintage-look, distressed leather number by an American brand took my fancy. It’s soft and comforting and discreet. It could be sexually symbolic but sometimes a bag should be just a bag.
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Happy New Year! Hope you all have a wonderful and save party. We had a lot of fun featuring some amazing bags in 07 and look forward to all the exciting designer handbags to come for 2008. Even with the rising costs in designer handbags, we are dedicated to finding the best deals in designer handbags and accessories. So here’s to kicking off the new year right!
